Project Description

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Kneecap.

KNEECAP
+ Miss Kaninna
@ The Triffid, Brisbane,
12th March 2025
(Live Review)

Review and photos by Alec Smart (@alecsmart_fotos)

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Kneecap

Kneecap, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 12 March 2025

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Kneecap, the Northern Irish hip-hop trio made famous by the humorous 2024 biographical drama film Kneecap, performed a sold-out concert at The Triffid in Brisbane, supported by Indigenous hip-hop artist Kaninna Langford – aka Miss Kaninna.

Many in the audience wore Irish-themed attire, including balaclavas, in homage to DJ Próvai (the stage name of sound mixer J.J. Ó Dochartaigh), who wears an orange, white and green balaclava, the colour of the Irish national flag.

Balaclavas in Northern Ireland were made iconic by the Provisional IRA, the republican militant force that was proscribed by Britain during ‘The Troubles’ that led-up to the Ceasefire Agreement in 1998.

There were also Aboriginal and Palestinian flags among the crowd, reflecting the band and their followers’ avowedly progressive politics.

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Miss Kaninna

Miss Kaninna, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 12 March 2025

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Main support artist, Miss Kaninna, with long braided hair tresses and a cropped leather top, was is in fine form, despite her state-hopping appearance three days earlier at the Adelaide WOMAD festival, then immediately joining Kneecap in Melbourne the following night.

As the Belfast rappers’ primary accompaniment, which included five concerts on their 2025 Australian tour, Kneecap later complimented Miss Kaninna as “easily the best support act we’ve ever had.”

Onstage she is confident, acerbic, funny. Hailing from Bruny Island, off the south-eastern coast of Tasmania, and now based in Melbourne, she raps original compositions, with musical backing. She was accompanied on stage by her musical partner, whom she introduced as by DJ Alietta (whom I assume is her manager and song producer, Alieta Tomoana, from Soul Has No Tempo) on the tape decks.

The granddaughter of Aboriginal activist and renowned artist Rosalind Langford, Miss Kaninna was the 2023 Triple J Radio Unearthed Artist of the Year when she received widespread acclaim for her debut single, Blak Britney.

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Miss Kaninna

Miss Kaninna, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 12 March 2025

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In 2024, she was the first solo Aboriginal woman to be nominated for an ARIA award for a debut single. She was also recently long-listed for the 2025 Rolling Stone Australia Best New Artist award.

Before introducing a new song, The WhiteWay, she encouraged the audience to chant ‘Fuck Peter Dutton!”

A few days earlier the Liberal Party leader was hob-knobbing with billionaires at a lavish Sydney harbourside soirée run by Merivale venue magnate Justin Hemmes. Meanwhile, his semi-rural Queensland constituency was directly in the path of tropical Cyclone Alfred when it came thrashing ashore at 120km/h, the first hurricane to hit the region in 75 years. Thousands of residents endured power outages and localised flooding.

Miss Kaninna clutched a microphone stand wrapped in a Palestinian keffiyah (black & white scarf) and told a few anecdotes recounting her meteoric rise to fame. She bitterly recalled a December 2023 controversy during which she guest DJ’d the Hip Hop Show on Triple J Radio and played a song by Lowkey, titled Long Live Palestine.

She revealed that she introduced the 2011 protest song as relevant to the current crisis in the Middle East and criticised Israel’s current genocide of Palestinians in Gaza as exactly that – a genocide.

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Miss Kaninna

Miss Kaninna, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 12 March 2025

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“12 years later the genocide, the oppression and the continued hate towards Palestine people on their lands is wild. When is something going to change?,” she had asked the listeners on air.

“As an Aboriginal sovereign woman I stand in solidarity with my brothers and sisters of Palestine. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”

Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp described the incident as an “outburst”. After 10 public complaints, the censorious ABC Ombudsman, Fiona Cameron, held an inquiry.

She subsequently ruled: “ABC standards require that all news and information is presented with due impartiality…. In this context the comments were not duly impartial.”

Ms Cameron ordered extra training of ABC staff on ‘impartiality’, plus the cessation of all future guest-run programs on the Hip Hop Show, and the recording of the program featuring Miss Kaninna be deleted from the Triple J website.

The audience responded with “Shame! Shame!” and several Palestinian flags fluttered.

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Kneecap

Kneecap, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 12 March 2025

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After a break, during which the balaclava-wearing fans in the front row began chantingFree Palestine!”, followed by the old Irish Republican Army (IRA) rallying cry, “Ooh, ah, up the ‘RA!”, Kneecap paced onto the stage. Stage lighting remained dim throughout their performance (which made them very challenging to photograph), and clouds of dry ice enshrouded the stage as the band delivered their politically-charged set.

The trio, stage names Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvaí, rap in both Gaelic Irish and English and focus largely on taunting authorities – specifically the British administration that ruled Northern Ireland since the 3 May 1921 partition of Ireland.

(Quick history: following the Irish War of Independence – 1919-21 – Britain hived-off the northern province to favour the Protestant community. Most of them descended from Scottish Presbyterian settlers who relocated to the north in the early 17th Century, following the British Act of Uniformity introduced by Elizabeth I to forcibly convert the Irish from Catholicism to Protestantism).

Kneecap’s songs detail the common grievances of the Irish Nationalist community under sectarian rule and praise resistance fighters like the IRA.

Ironically, in the lyrics of Your Sniffer Dogs Are Shite, H.O.O.D. and Rhino Ket (about a rhino high on ketamine), Kneecap also joke about recreational drug use, something the IRA abhorred. During The Troubles – the inter-community conflict from late 1960s to the 1998 power-sharing agreement – IRA units frequently dealt out punishment beatings to errant youth – especially drug dealers.

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Kneecap

Kneecap, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 12 March 2025

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Those involved in activities deemed counter to community values were disciplined by the paramilitaries, and the more serious the offence, the harsher the reprimand.

A common punishment was kneecapping –  a malicious wounding where victims were typically forced to lie down and were shot in the knee from behind – from which the band’s name derives. This harsh rebuke usually caused major damage to the knee joint, but, despite its name, generally avoided shattering the actual kneecap, although many victims were crippled for life.

Approximately 2,500 people were subjected to these ‘punishment shootings’ throughout The Troubles.

However, despite their politically-driven rage, Kneecap are a hilarious trio, and frequently joke between songs. Referring to the previous night’s concert, they announced, “Our Melbourne gig was brilliant!” This, unsurprisingly, elicited loud boos from the audience, to which they responded, “You know what to do then – fuck Melbourne!!”

In regards to recreational drug enjoyment, which they don’t disguise, they announced mid-concert: “Security says in order for everyone to feel safe, you have to throw your drugs onstage!”

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Kneecap

Kneecap, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 12 March 2025

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The Kneecap biopic movie in which they starred features an early scene of a priest innocently wafting marijuana smoke from a swinging thurible during a Catholic church service, resulting in the congregation getting stoned. The voice-over says, “Next Sunday, that congregation doubled!”

The trio also taunted those viewing from the upper-rear balcony of The Triffid, a space usually occupied by the more senior members of the audience who avoid jostling moshpits. “How’s all the old fuckers on the balcony? All the wee pensioners! We want to see stage diving from the balcony! How about, for the first time in history, a moshpit on the balcony!”

In regards to the success of their 2024 best-selling second album, Fine Art, which features the band’s iconic balaclava face logo (two eye holes and a mouth against a dark background), they revealed, “Our album shot straight to number 2 on the charts! Don’t cheer, that’s the runner-up! Taylor Swift’s album got the number one. We’ve never heard of him. He’s an Australian surfer dude, apparently!”

One of the trio, Mo Chara perhaps, advised that a digital copy of their latest album could be purchased and downloaded from Amazon website. Another member, probably Móglaí Bap, countered, “Or you can download it for free from a dodgy website, and don’t give him the 10 cents in royalties!”

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Kneecap

Kneecap, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 12 March 2025

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During Parful, the rapping duo left the stage and DJ Próvai performed solo, then the other two returned for Get Your Brits Out waving an Irish tricolour while DJ Próvai leapt into the audience and crowd-surfed (Irish style, on his back) carried aloft on a sea of hands.

They finished on H.O.O.D. after a speech in which they expressed support for Palestinians – “Fuck the Zionist cunts!” – which elicited a huge audience cheer.

It was inspiring seeing the predominantly young audience embracing progressive community politics. Support for the Palestinian cause was a common theme on T-shirts. I wore my T-shirt commemorating the 25th anniversary of the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry, the first time in over 25 years. (Now I’m showing my age – the 50th anniversary of the shooting of Irish nationalists on a protest march by British paratroopers took place on 30 January 2022).

The band exited in a cloud of stage smoke and the Irish nationalist song Come Out Ye Black & Tans!  by Wolfe Tones was broadcast across the arena.

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Kneecap
Set List

Intro
It’s Been Ages
Amach Anocht
Fenian Cunts
Thart agus Thart
Better Way to Live
Sick in the Head
Your Sniffer Dogs Are Shite
I bhFiacha Linne
I’m Flush
Fine Art
Rhino Ket
Guilty Conscience
C.E.A.R.T.A
Parful
Get Your Brits Out
H.O.O.D

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Kneecap

Kneecap, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 12 March 2025

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Check out Alec Smart’s (@alecsmart_fotos) full gallery of this event HERE


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Kneecap

Kneecap, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 12 March 2025

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Follow KNEECAP
Web – Facebook – Instagram
 Music – YouTube


Follow MISS KANINNA
Web – Facebook – Instagram
 Bandcamp – YouTube


frontiertouring.com/kneecap – facebook.com/frontiertouring
instagram.com/frontiertouring – x.com/frontiertouring

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Kneecap

Kneecap, The Triffid, Brisbane, Australia. Photo: Alec Smart, 12 March 2025

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Press Release 5th September 2024 (below) HERE

KNEECAP
announces Brisbane and Perth
venue upgrades to
meet high ticket demand
– on sale now!

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Kneecap.


AMNPLIFY – DB

CLICK THE PIC TO VIEW THE NEWS